Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series
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Speaker Schedule
Unless otherwise specified, seminars are held on Fridays from 12-1 p.m. in Harder House Room 104 throughout Fall and Winter terms. For those taking the seminar for credit, grading is based on attendance, either in-person or remote.
CONTACT US: If you have questions, comments, or topic/speaker suggestions, or if you would like to present a seminar, please email Wayne Wakeland.
SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENT LISTSERV: To receive seminar announcements, you can join our mailing list. If that doesn't work, please email Wayne Wakeland.
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Neural Coding and Decoding
Alexander Dimitrov
10-29-2010
Methods based on Rate Distortion theory have been successfully used to cluster stimuli and neural responses in order to study neural codes at a level of detail supported by the ...Read More
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Understanding, Modeling and Valuing Ecosystem Services
Robert Costanza
10-22-2010
Ecosystem services (ES) are the direct and indirect contributions of ecosystems (in combination with other inputs) to human well-being. An ES-based approach can assess the trade-offs inherent in managing humans ...Read More
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How a Systems Engineer Starts...
Herman Migliore
10-15-2010
Dr. Migliore will review systems engineering as a process for developing products, processes, and services and suggest views that encourage systems thinking. As an example, he will focus on the ...Read More
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Reducing Overdose Deaths Associated with Pharmaceutical Opioid Treatment of Chronic Pain: Analyzing Interventions with a System Dynamics Model
Wayne Wakeland
10-8-2010
A dramatic rise in the use pharmaceutical opioids to treat pain, and the associated opioid abuse and addiction, has created a substantial public health problem in the United States. Effective ...Read More
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The Hydro-ecology of Everyday Life: Assessing the Social and Environmental Determinants of Water Use in the Portland Region
Vivek Shandas
5-14-2010
Driven in part by the imminent threats of population growth and climate destabilization, recent studies suggest that urban areas face severe water scarcity, with some areas in Australia and the ...Read More
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Road Pricing
Anthony M. Rufolo
5-7-2010
Fuel taxes are an important source of funds for roads. However, increasing fuel efficiency and the potential for alternative fueled vehicles have raised questions about the long-term viability of this ...Read More
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What Makes a Meaningful Universe?
Todd Duncan and James Butler
4-30-2010
A common line of thinking says that although we feel subjectively that our thoughts and actions matter in some way, this perception is an illusion. According to this view, an ...Read More
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Holism and Human History
Martin Zwick
4-16-2010
This paper uses a systems-theoretic model to structure an account of human history. According to the model, a process, after its beginning and early development, often reaches a critical stage ...Read More
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Reconstructability Analysis of Elementary Cellular Automata
Martin Zwick and Hui Shi
3-12-2010
Reconstructability analysis is a method to determine whether a multivariate relation, defined set- or information-theoretically, is decomposable with or without loss (reduction in constraint) into lower ordinality relations. Set-theoretic reconstructability ...Read More
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Computational Pharmacology: Simulating Circuits of the Brain for Drug Development
Patrick D. Roberts
3-5-2010
The pharmaceutical industry is approaching unsustainable research costs to develop new drug therapies for mental disease because of the high failure rate in clinical trials. These failures are due to ...Read More
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Biologically Inspired Computing: The DARPA SyNAPSE Program & The Hierarchical Temporal Memory
Dan Hammerstrom
2-26-2010
This presentation provides an update on biologically inspired computation. In particular, it focuses on two important developments in this area, the DARPA SyNAPSE program (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable ...Read More
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Vehicle Routing Problems in Congested Urban Areas
Miguel Figliozzi
2-19-2010
This talk will discuss vehicle routing problems in congested urban areas. Modeling approaches, data collection issues, and solution algorithms to solve real-world problems will be described and analyzed.
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Efficient Encoding of Vocalizations in the Auditory Midbrain
Lars Andreas Holmstrom
2-12-2010
An important question in sensory neuroscience is what coding strategies and mechanisms are used by the brain to detect and discriminate among behaviorally relevant stimuli. To address the noisy response ...Read More
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Understanding Classification Decisions for Object Detection
Will Landecker, Michael David Thomure, and Melanie Mitchell
2-5-2010
Computer vision systems are traditionally tested in the object detection paradigm. In these experiments, a vision system is asked whether or not a specific object--for example an animal--occurs in a ...Read More
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Reviewing the Role of Systems Analysis in Data Networks and the Possible Role for System Theories going Forward
Grant Kirby
1-22-2010
Data networks have been a very important catalyst in the growth of business in the US. As data networks became more complex in the 1970s and 1980s it was necessary ...Read More
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Aging-in-place Research at ORCATECH: Making Sense of the Data
Tamara Hayes
1-15-2010
The Oregon Center for Aging and Technology (ORCATECH) seeks to facilitate successful aging and reduce the cost of healthcare by establishing the evidence base for technologies supporting aging-in-place research and ...Read More
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Criticisms of Systems Science
Joshua Hughes
1-8-2010
A new year often begins with a sense of optimism, but we (ever the contrarians) will begin it with a healthy dose of pessimism. This week's seminar will be a ...Read More
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Creating Insanity in Learning Systems: Addressing Ambiguity Effects of Predicting Non-linear Continuous Valued Functions with Reconstructabilty Analysis from Large Categorically Valued Input Data Sets
William D. Eisenhauer
12-4-2009
Being told to give two different, and potentially counter, responses to the same stimulus can set up a double bind in humans, leading to a type of insanity. So what ...Read More
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Towards Robot Theatre
Marek Perkowski
11-20-2009
The talk will present the idea of futuristic robot theatre and work done towards it at the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at PSU. After a ...Read More
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The Complexity-Independence of the Origin of Life
Radu Popa
11-13-2009
It is often stated that the macroevolution of life is driven toward increased Complexity, and indeed, biosystems situated at higher evolutionary level show higher levels of Complexity. Yet, evidence also ...Read More
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Generalists, Specialists, and the Best Experts: Where do Systems Thinkers Fit In?
Joshua Hughes
11-6-2009
GENERALIST / SPECIALIST: A generalist is someone who has studied a little bit of everything, and in the end knows nothing well in particular. By contrast, a specialist is someone ...Read More
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Water as a Complex System: Understanding the Dynamics in a Changing Environment
Heejun Chang
10-30-2009
The water resources system is constantly evolving over space and time at a range of scales. Human-induced climate change and land development are probably two major driving forces of water ...Read More
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Doing the History of Science and the Suspension of Belief
Richard H. Beyler
10-23-2009
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1817) described the "suspension of disbelief" as a sort of bargain between the author and the audience necessary to creative literature. Conversely, one might describe the "suspension ...Read More
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Beyond Biobricks: Synthesizing Synergistic Biochemical Systems from the Bottom-up
Mark A. Bedau
10-9-2009
Engineers who attempt to discover and optimize the behavior of complex biochemical systems face a dauntingly difficult task. This is especially true if the systems are governed by multiple qualitative ...Read More